What Death Takes Away: Reading Shelly Kagan

I came to Shelly Kagan’s Death through a cluster of widely circulated American university lectures. Michael Sandel asks what justice requires. Tal Ben-Shahar asks what makes a life happier. Kagan asks what happens when the life in question ends. Each course starts from something familiar and shows how quickly it becomes difficult.

Death grew out of Kagan’s Yale course. The book follows the arguments closely enough to make the reader work through them, while its examples give you somewhere to start.

What Has to Survive for Me to Survive?

Before asking whether there is a life after death, Kagan asks what sort of thing a person is. A dualist takes a person to involve a body and an immaterial soul. A physicalist tries to account for thought and personality in terms of the body and what it can do.

He tests arguments for the soul, including ones associated with Descartes and Plato’s Phaedo. One test is inference to the best explanation: does positing a soul account for something better than the alternatives do? Kagan doubts that the examples establish what their proponents want them to establish.

The answer matters when you ask when death occurs. You can mean the point at which the organism stops functioning or the point at which it loses the capacities that make a person recognizable as a person. Those questions can come apart.

Can Death Be Bad for the Person Who Dies?

A person can dread dying while alive. After death, who is there to suffer what has happened? Kagan takes seriously the Epicurean challenge that a bad thing needs someone for whom it is bad.

The deprivation account asks us to look at the goods the person could have had if they had lived. A person does not have to experience the missing years as pain for those years to matter.

Lucretius’s question complicates that answer. If the future in which I do not exist is bad for me, what should I make of the long past in which I did not exist? Kagan considers what makes our attitudes to those two absences different.

The Value of a Life That Ends

An endless life sounds attractive until you try to imagine what would keep it worth living. The book separates the value of being alive from the pleasures, commitments and difficulties that fill the time. It asks how those elements count toward the value of a life as a whole.

Kagan goes on to ask how to live with the fact that our time is limited and the end is unpredictable. In the final lectures he also distinguishes questions about the rationality and morality of suicide. He treats them as questions in moral philosophy, examining what different theories would count as reasons.

I read the book to think about death. I put it down thinking about how little of a life can be spent on everything that might be worth doing. The question is which things deserve the time I have.

Death, PHIL 176 · Open Yale Courses